Meet Carrie Fertig, our upcoming exhibiting artist at the Barn.
Updated: Sep 15
Carrie Fertig, the artist behind our next exhibition at the Barn, Health of the Sublime, describes herself as a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, sound, spoken word, and installation. Based in Laurencekirk, her work centres on community and communion with ourselves and in relation to each other, the places we love, and the natural world around us.
Fertig says she tries “to make work that is emotionally and spiritually useful”. The uplifting spirit and community heart of Health of the Sublime is no exception.
Health of the Sublime charts our collective and individual experiences of well-being in the natural world, through the lens of climate change. Fertig says the exhibition is about “deeply immersing ourselves in the natural world”.
Now a large-scale participatory arts project, Health of the Sublime has its' roots in deep in isolation and contemplation. When lockdown hit in 2020, Fertig was living in Moray with no employment, and no friends or family in the area. Carrie was living on an 18,000 acre estate at the time and says she was very fortunate to have been surrounded by so much nature. When she began documenting and sharing her experiences of being immersed in nature online, she found her community engaged with this and found it beneficial. This prompted her to consider how she could share these experiences with more people.
Partnering with Mearns and Coastal Healthy Living Network, she began running poetry and writing workshops, partnering with talented writers. She taught art in nature, video and audio workshops, and for people who couldn't join otherwise, the creative use of virtual reality. Participants were “building their own immersive environments with the photographs of the places that they loved. From this, there is a digital map that contains the participants work which stretches as far as Japan, The United States, and Australia, but most of the experiences the participants bring to The Health of the Sublime are based here in Scotland.” You can visit this map via the link below:
As part of the exhibition, Carrie will present embroidered textile maps, the products of three different workshops, including one hosted right here at the Barn. To continue the work of this participatory process, the Barn will host a range of workshops linked to the Health of the Sublime, allowing participants to deeply immerse yourself in the Sublime, exploring the themes of the exhibition, connecting to nature and those around you.
Carrie will be leading workshops at the Barn including Wellbeing in the Garden – a video workshop where we’ll create short films, and Centring Voices on the Margin – a poetry workshop where we’ll write from the point of view of someone or something else that shares a place we find meaningful in nature. Carrie says “leading workshops and teaching are some of the greatest joys of my life”.
Carrie has invited fellow artists Monica de la Haye and Eve Mosher to host workshops at the Barn as part of the exhibition also. Imagining the Future by Eve Mosher invites us to imagine future worlds through writing exercises, and our Family Friendly Poetry Class will be lead by Monica de la Haye, where children and their parents are invited to observe nature in the wild garden, and make poetry from each others observations.
To book into any of these classes, please click through to our website here.
Health of the Sublime will be showing at the Barn from the 26th of September to the 24th of October, and is open Thursday – Saturday, 12pm – 4pm.
